Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Well, of course,” Declan Boyd said. “You’ll be right on the spot. St. Agnes’s is why you are here.”

  Gregor might have corrected this impression, but at that moment the cabdriver found an opening in the traffic and shot into it. Gregor was knocked against the back of his seat, and Declan Boyd winced at the squeal of tires.

  “These cabdrivers are awful,” he told Gregor. “I think they watch Edward G. Robinson movies in their spare time.”

  Gregor thought Declan Boyd listened to Firesign Theater in his, but he didn’t say so.

  [4]

  As it turned out, Gregor never had a chance to ask Declan Boyd about Cheryl Cass that night. Even with the rush-hour traffic and the strange illogic of Colchester’s streets, the ride was too short. Gregor had to wonder why he’d thought it wouldn’t be. He’d never been in Colchester, but he’d heard enough about it, from Cardinal O’Bannion and Father Tom Dolan and even the men in Colchester Homicide. If there was a sign with an arrow pointing to the Cathedral in the train station, then the Cathedral had to be near the train station. St. Agnes’s, everyone had said, was the closest regular parish to the Cathedral’s own. He supposed he hadn’t realized how close that would be.

  It was 5:25 when they left the train station. It was only 5:37 when they pulled up in front of a low wrought-iron gate with a cross sticking up from the center of its swing panel. The world had gone from darkening to dark and from cold to nearly freezing. The wind was strong and stiff and the sidewalks capped with ice. In the time they’d been together, Declan Boyd had said exactly one thing about Cheryl Cass, and that at the last minute.

  “I met her, you know,” he’d told Gregor as the cab came screeching to the curb. “Twice. Both times on Ash Wednesday. She came to the rectory to see Father Walsh, once in the morning and once at nearly five. That’s what makes this whole thing so creepy. She was such a nice, sad woman.”

  Gregor tried desperately to remember what had brought this up. In the meantime, Declan Boyd vaulted out of the cab, skidded on the sidewalk, and came to a stop at the wrought-iron gate.

  “Oh, no,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?” Gregor struggled with his suitcase and the cab fare—he’d been ready with the cab fare, priests never had enough money to pay for anything—until he reached Declan Boyd’s side. The cherubic priest looked so dismayed, Gregor thought the rectory must have burned down.

  “Look at that,” Father Boyd said, pointing to the smallest of the three small brick buildings at the left side of the back of the lot. The church was at the left side of the front of the lot and was big by anyone’s standards. “The Cardinal Archbishop is going to have a cat.”

  “About what?”

  “Look,” Declan Boyd insisted.

  Gregor looked and saw a window filled with stuffed bunnies, marshmallow chicks, chocolate rabbits, and pink plastic eggs oozing jelly beans.

  “The Cardinal,” Declan Boyd said, “hates this sort of thing. And Andy knows it.”

  “Do you mean Father Walsh?”

  “Of course I mean Father Walsh. He’s always pulling stunts like this. Always. He knows the Cardinal’s going to be here tomorrow—”

  “Why would the Cardinal be here tomorrow? I thought you said he was busy on Holy Thursday.”

  “He is. But he’s going to be here for the ten o’clock Mass. I think they’re all going to be here. Father Dolan, too, and that nun secretary of the Cardinal’s. There have been rumors.”

  “Of what?”

  “Liturgical silliness,” Declan Boyd said solemnly. “Father Walsh is addicted to it. So you see, he must have put all that stuff in the window on purpose, and it’s Lent, and—oh, here’s Sister.”

  Here, indeed, was Sister, an enormously tall woman in a modernized habit and no coat, striding through the door of the largest of the three brick buildings with her arms wrapped around her body to protect herself against the cold. She passed under one of the sidewalk lamps just as the wind battered against her veil, and Gregor saw that her hair was a bright, nearly orange, red.

  “Dec,” she said when she got to them, “what are you thinking of? It’s ten below out here.”

  “What are you thinking of?” Declan Boyd said. “Where’s your cape?”

  “I left it in my office. I’ve had a long day.” She held out her hand to Gregor and said, “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Sister Mary Scholastica.”

  “How do you do,” Gregor said.

  “Sister Martha is waiting for you at Rosary House.” Scholastica turned and pointed through the trees at the third of the brick buildings. “I think she’ll make you very comfortable. She’ll try, anyway.”

  “I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  “Are you? I wouldn’t be. Stereotypes notwithstanding, nuns can be very disorganized people.” She unlatched the gate and pulled it open. “Come along now. All we’d need is to have you die of pneumonia on our doorstep. That would give the Cardinal a case of terminal apoplexy.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Demarkian has had his dinner yet,” Declan Boyd said, as he and Gregor hurried to catch up. Sister Scholastica was already halfway to their destination and in no mood to slow down. Gregor didn’t blame her.

  “He probably hasn’t even had lunch,” Father Boyd said plaintively. “The train takes I don’t know how long from Philadelphia.”

  “The train takes forever from Philadelphia,” Sister Scholastica said, “and Martha has dinner all ready and waiting. I’m afraid, Mr. Demarkian, she won’t have breakfast. It’s Holy Thursday tomorrow. There’s a great deal we have to do. If you want breakfast you’ll have to come over to the convent for it.”

  “That will be fine,” Gregor said.

  Scholastica reached the door of Rosary House, punched the bell, and turned to wait for them. “Under ordinary circumstances,” she said, “you would have taken your meals at the rectory and stayed there, too. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any ordinary circumstances in St. Agnes Parish in quite some time.”

  “Now, Sister,” Declan Boyd started.

  But Sister had her back to them again. The door of Rosary House had opened and a little nun had come out onto the porch, much younger and smaller than her superior and much less able to look comfortable in the cold. This, Gregor thought, had to be Sister Martha. And he was right.

  He was right about something else, too. His first impression of Sister Scholastica was that she was a very smart woman and that she knew she was smart. She had that air of automatic authority that can only be developed over many long years of trial virtually unmixed with error. She didn’t look old enough to have developed that in the convent.

  Gregor wondered momentarily who had said what to Scholastica to make her this suspicious of him, then allowed himself be let into Rosary House and down a long narrow hallway to the kitchen. Sister Martha had laid out his dinner there, at a broad oak table meant to seat eight. One whiff of the smell coming out of the bowl at the one set place, and Gregor had no doubt about what he was being served. “Lentils and olive oil,” Sister Martha told him happily. “I consulted with Father Marcovian at Christ the Lord Armenian Church. You won’t have to break your Lent while I’m around!”

  THREE

  [1]

  FATHER ANDREW WALSH KNEW exactly what his Cardinal Archbishop thought of him. A flake, a jerk, a goof-off—the words that rolled down from on high through one parishioner or the other were all epithets for an airhead. The Cardinal Archbishop did not call Andy Walsh a heretic, because the Cardinal Archbishop did not think Andy Walsh was smart enough—or serious enough—to be one. The Cardinal Archbishop did think Andy Walsh was dangerous, because the Cardinal Archbishop thought all stupid people were dangerous. The Cardinal Archbishop was a man whose intelligence had been discovered early and sheltered rigorously. In some secret part of him, he didn’t believe there were any stupid people. When a man was dense or slow or illogical or oblivious, the Cardinal Archbishop thought he was doing it on purpos
e.

  Andy Walsh stopped at the mirror that hung on the wall at the bottom of the rectory’s back stairs, checked out the fall of his Sassoon cut, and wondered why he persisted in thinking of O’Bannion as the “Cardinal Archbishop” instead of just the “Cardinal.” Maybe it was just an instinctive reaction. Andy had never had much patience with authority or pomposity or high seriousness. He believed in God, but the God he believed in made much more sense than the one people like O’Bannion kept trying to foist on their gullible parishioners. Andy Walsh’s God didn’t deal in absurdities, like transubstantiation. The idea of Jesus Christ, still in human form, rushing around heaven turning bread and wine into His Body and Blood was just silly. He didn’t deal in impossibilities either, like holiness and sanctity. Andy Walsh’s God was much too good a God to punish people for their sins, or even to believe in sin in the first place. He was a great formless mass of uncritical Love, waiting to dissolve each and every human soul into the undifferentiated ocean of His perfect peace at the moment of death.

  Or something.

  Andy Walsh looked a little harder at his image in the mirror, and frowned. He had had a long day, and he looked it. There was one thing the Cardinal Archbishop had never been able to accuse him of. He was not a haphazard head of his parish. He said Mass and heard confessions with strict punctuality. He made sure the roof didn’t leak and the bills were paid up. He organized and oversaw every possible lay group from the Social Action Committee to the Fatima Novena, even though he didn’t believe Fatima had ever happened and thought the rosary an even sillier idea than transubstantiation. He was more than slightly aware of the fact that he had become head of this parish at a very young age on no merits of his own. The priest shortage had forced the Cardinal Archbishop’s predecessor into appointing him. He had promised himself, at the beginning, that nobody would ever be able to say he ran a slipshod operation.

  Still. He looked at his image in the mirror one more time, made a face at it, and headed up the hall to the kitchen. Most of the time, being a parish priest was too much work, but not too too much. By getting up at five and going to bed at ten, he could get through what he had to get through in a reasonably restful frame of mind. Christmas and Holy Week made a hash of everything—especially Holy Week. All of a sudden, everybody on Earth got an attack of the guilts. There were extra confessions to hear and special penitential services to ease the embarrassed back into church. On Good Friday, there were the Stations of the Cross. From Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday, there were special Masses and special services, times when you did and did not consecrate, times when you did and did not offer Communion, special rubrics, special prayers—and, always, a new pack of altar girls and boys to be trained and worried about. He had to worry about them, because they never got it right. Andy gave a little thought to the altar girls. With O’Bannion coming tomorrow, it might be just as well to do without them. It might be just as well to do without Judy Eagan handing out Communion, too. Andy didn’t mind offending O’Bannion—he went out of his way to do it often enough—but the damned idiot was likely to embarrass people. Andy didn’t want a lot of defrocked altar girls weeping all through Mass in the back of his church. He didn’t want Judy Eagan, shorn of her robes and deprived of her place at the altar, in high dudgeon, either. He couldn’t understand why the Church didn’t just give up and get with the spirit of the times. It was a new world. It wasn’t going to do the Church any good to refuse to live in it.

  Judy Eagan was waiting for him in the kitchen.

  Andy stuck his head through the kitchen door and said, “Have I kept you waiting forever? I feel like the walking dead.”

  Judy was sitting in one chair with her long legs stretched across another, drinking a cup of coffee. “I’m all right,” she told him. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “That sounds like a very dangerous activity.” He came in, sat down in one of the free chairs, and reached for the coffee. “I suppose you’ve got a lot to think about. What with Stuart running for office and all.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Andy. Don’t joke. This is serious.”

  “I think I’m getting tired of people telling me things are serious. What’s serious? Stuart will run for Congress. Either he’ll win or he won’t. It won’t make a damn bit of difference to the state of the world.”

  “It’ll make a lot of difference to the state of my life.”

  “True,” Andy says. “If he wins, you’ll marry the idiot. I’ll pray for a really big loss. Something really cataclysmic. Like Reagan-Mondale.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Judy stood up and started to prowl around the kitchen, moving from the dove of peace poster on the refrigerator door to the clasped hands poster (legend in Spanish) on the cabinet next to the sink. Andy Walsh found himself wishing he possessed that intangible thing known as a sex drive. He had, once, but he seemed to have lost it. If he’d kept it, Judy would have been just his cup of tea. It wasn’t that she was such a beautiful woman—although she might have been; he wasn’t good at that kind of judgment—as that she was so uncompromisingly groomed and so blatantly expensive. Everything, from the smooth muscled tightness of her calves to the studied informality of her tossled blond hair, had been calculated. And paid for. He wondered what it cost to have ten nails that were always the same shape, always the same length, and always the same color.

  She stopped in front of his framed photograph of a starving Ethiopian child and said, “To tell you the truth, it’s not Stuart I’ve been worrying about. It’s all this fuss about Cheryl Cass.”

  “Why?”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, curious. “Doesn’t it ever bother you? The Cardinal’s trying to pin the whole thing on you—”

  “Which he can’t do,” Andy pointed out, “because his theory’s nonsense and I didn’t do anything anyway. I didn’t even talk to her about being ill.”

  “What did you talk to her about?”

  “Nothing much, really. This and that. High school.”

  “Black Rock Park?”

  “Of course Black Rock Park,” Andy said. “She didn’t think about that the way we do, you know. She found it a very pleasant memory.”

  “That’s because she wasn’t around to see the fuss it caused.” Judy’s voice was sharp. “She just disappeared into thin air.”

  “Actually, she disappeared South for a while. And she was much less enamored of Black Rock Park than she was of the year that came after.”

  “What happened then?”

  “She got married.”

  Judy turned full around to face him, looking surprised. “Married? Cheryl Cass?”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Andy said. “She was very pretty in those days.”

  “She was tarty,” Judy said. “Lord, she was the tartiest girl I ever saw. I wonder who she found to marry her.”

  “Probably nobody you’d be interested in.”

  “Probably not. Did she give you a name?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I hate it when you’re like this.” She came back to the table and sat down again. “Anyway, it’s not what she did there that worries me. It’s what she did here. Meaning die.”

  “Judy, what do you want? There’s been a coroner’s report. There’s been an inquest. There’s been a verdict of suicide—”

  “I know what the verdict was, Andy. I also know that kind of verdict can be changed. If the police have new evidence, say.”

  “I don’t think the police are looking for new evidence.”

  “They would be if they could,” Judy said. “That man who came here, the Lieutenant—”

  “John Smith.” Andy laughed. “God, he hated having a name like that. Every time anybody used it he went brick red. I didn’t blame him. If I had a name like that I’d—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Judy said. “Dear God, Andy, sometimes you’re worse than Stuart. Can’t you keep your mind on anything?”

  “On what, for Christ’s sake?”

  Judy le
aned across the table. “What do you know about your houseguest across the courtyard? John Cardinal O’Bannion’s personal little invitee?”

  “I know he’s not so little. What am I supposed to tell you, Judy? I haven’t even met him. He got in around five-thirty or so and I was tied up in the church. I saw him come across the courtyard while I was sorting choir robes. He’s taller than Kath.”

  “He’s also practically famous,” Judy said. “I know you never read the newspapers unless they’ve got a story with your name in it—”

  “Don’t do that, Judy. I keep a very close eye on what’s going on in Central America—”

  “Oh, Central America. Forget Central America. Like I said, this Gregor Demarkian is practically famous.”

  “For what?”

  “For investigating murders.”

  “You mean he’s some kind of a policeman?”

  Judy sighed, stood up again, walked back to the refrigerator, shook her head. Her whole body seemed weighed down with the infinite weariness of contempt. “For God’s sake,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind?”

  “All right, I will. Back around Christmas some time, there was a series of murders in this town in Pennsylvania. It started out to be this rich old man and then, I don’t know, a couple of his children. According to the papers—I went back and looked it all up at the library—anyway, according to the papers, Gregor Demarkian basically solved the entire case for the police. Do you know what the papers also said?”

  “What?”

  “He used to be in the FBI, in charge of investigating mass murderers. Men like Ted Bundy. That’s what Gregor Demarkian does, Andy. He specializes in murders.”

  Andy sat very still, taking all this in. Then he said, very slowly, “The thing is, it doesn’t matter what Gregor Demarkian specializes in. Cheryl Cass wasn’t murdered, and I certainly didn’t murder her.”

  “I know you didn’t murder her, Andy, but are you so sure she wasn’t murdered?”